Orange - a short mischievous rambling on third grade

No stuff. Just story.
Logan's favorite color for a while was orange.
That reminded me of another little boy who liked orange.
Like everyone else in my first grade class, Peter Hendrickson was issued a box of 8 fat crayons.
He wanted to trade his blue crayon for my orange one.
We didn't trade, but he did manage to negotiate with other kids, and wound up with a majority of his crayons being orange.

Peter was also in my third grade class.  I think I would be embellishing history to claim that he had a favorite orange sweater that year. The sweater I remember could well have been in first grade.

In third grade there was a box in the front of the room where we put book reports. These were not really reports, but rather purple ditto forms that could be completed in five minutes - Title, Author, Main idea.
I don't know if the contest was official, but Peter and I were definitely competing to be the one who had read the most books.  As far as I am concerned, he cheated in a major way by getting chicken pox so that he could stay home and read for days and days.  Ricky McHugh might have been a contender, too, but he only read the skinniest books he could find, so, while annoying, he was hard to take seriously.

Our third grade teacher was Miss Coffin, and I suspect that she was new.  This was long before No Child Left Behind, so there was much more flexibility in the curriculum.
Miss Coffin was taking flying lessons, so her class learned to spell "fuselage" and "aileron" and to label the parts of an airplane on a line drawing.

Also, Miss Coffin mispronounced "mischievous".  She said  mis-CHE-vi-ous.
I have since learned that there has been much discussion of this word, and that she was clearly not the only one who used that pronunciation.  However, I was told at home that this was absolutely not right, and, indeed, on the subject of the extra syllable,  "evidence for the spelling goes back to the 16th century. Our pronunciation files contain modern attestations ranging from dialect speakers to Herbert Hoover. But both the pronunciation and the spelling are still considered nonstandard." (merriam-webster site)

NOTE TO SIBLINGS:  Not nearly as good a tale as "Afaghanstan", I know,but it's all I've got.

We used to sing

Going through a box of musty sheet music, it struck me that we don't sing much any more. 
Many of the pieces have names written on them: Mary Stuck, Mary E Keen, Marjorie Keen, Marjorie Smith, Grace Kwick, Grace K Keen..
Here is just a small part of the contents of that box.
I don't remember anyone actually playing any of these songs on the piano, but I know that both of my parents sang bits of all of them at one time or another - enough that I could probably still sing them.

It isn't that we sang at family picnics and holiday dinners.  It is just that the songs were around, somehow in the collective consciousness.
Maybe this happened because more people were listening to fewer radio stations, so had more songs in common?

I recently mentioned at Karen's house that my friends and I would sing folk songs* at slumber parties, and the response was, "What a weird childhood you had!"    Apparently my children and grandchildren didn't/don't sing on school bus trips, either.  I'm not sure who is weird. 


I'm sure we all sing along with the radio in the car.
Sometimes that tends toward strange, yes.  I make a point of listening for "Maoz Tzur" every Hanukkah, so that I can sing along.   And "Now Is The Month of Maying" reliably shows up on NPR every May 1.  But I also sing along with oldies and the occasional catchy country song, at least when I am alone.

In a slightly different category, maybe, but still in the class of unofficial singing, one of my treasured memories is of the Tower Hill Vocal Ensemble breaking into four-part Christmas carols (and possibly bits of Britten's Ceremony of Carols) while waiting for a table at Howard Johnson's after caroling at unremembered homes.   We were good, so the customers loved it.

Music makes such strong memories.
Tower Hill music might be its own post sometime.


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* specifically:  Michael Row the Boat Ashore, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Lemon Tree.. 
Probably limited to what could be accompanied by two or three chords on our ineptly played guitars.

Souvenir from New York City, probably 1997

I'm not sure what else can be said.
It is an impressive 16 page menu of drinks and cigars, and I have a matchbox to go with it.

Kinda spooky.

Actually, it was,  Even at the time.  I don't consider myself much of an acrophobe,  but I didn't like being there.  It wasn't a bar I would have liked even on street level, which I'm sure didn't help.  Really just wanted to go back down.

The other World Trade Center connection was a Ben & Jerry's purchase in the PATH train station.
Years later, at Harrah's in St. Louis in 2004, I bought another Ben &Jerry's cup, and realized that the last one had been in New York.. Another weird moment.

It's All Yours. 1961. Eighth Grade Operetta

This is the heavily annotated script for our Operetta.  The show was a Really Big Deal for me.
I got to be 'Coordination and Direction', which meant getting out of a lot of classes to go to rehearsals to document blocking decisions, etc.  It also meant staying late at school and going in on Saturdays to work on songs or make stencils and hang out with Mr. B.

It is a subject on which I can bore people to distraction.
At the 25th class reunion, it briefly became a game to try to find something I did not remember about the show. (Not entirely sure it was the 25th.. One of the gatherings at Tepe's that a lot of people attended.)
"What did Dave Conklin do in the Operetta?"
"Dave Conklin was not in our class that year"
"Yes he was! He started in Kindergarten!"
"He was in England for a couple of years.  He was not in the class in 8th grade."

Here is the list of who did what.  Yes, I did re-type it.  The original ditto is really faded.

Obviously, I could go on and on.
I'm proud of knowing the Delaware State Song and being able to add it into the Song of the Underground.  I got to sit with John McDevit in the Gourmet Club scene. I still know all the words to Susie Diver's great song.

I will skip over a rant about the fact that we did not get to have an evening performance (and follow-on party!) because of some scheduling person not paying attention and booking health guru Bonny Pruden to speak at Home and School - or something like that.  We missed out on a party, though.  Not fair.  Wanted that party.

Herewith a bit more of the show.
Feel free to ask me about it.  I'm likely to sing if you do, though.  Be warned.
You can read the whole thing if you want to.  I have scanned all the pages and put them here

Keens sure kept a lot of stuff - 1953 Christmas card

 

I just ran across this card mixed in with completely unrelated papers from 1958.

This is a Christmas Card to me in 1953 from my first grade teacher!

Interesting that it is signed in cursive when we, theoretically, could only read printing.

Her first name was Olive, which I thought was really funny. 

(I did entertain the possibility that the card was from Dorothy Moore, which would have made sense in the 1958 box.  However, this is not Dorothy's writing, and I believe that she would have signed it "Dorothy Moore" and sent it to all three kids, not just me.)

Piggy Bank

This little guy has been with me since I was in grade school.
He is six inches tall.
I like him because he is just so much cooler than the plain pink four-legged plastic one that preceded him.  Unlike the plastic pig, this one has no plug to take out to empty him.
I remember pictures in books of children taking a hammer to their banks to get to the coins.
Unthinkable in this case.
However, if you are patient, you can stick a table knife into the slot and shake coins around until they line up on the blade and slide out.  Just be sure that you don't fill the pig to capacity, or there will be no space for the knife.
For the record:  He is currently completely empty.

Toll House Cookies and me

 

I can smell chocolate chip cookies just looking at this jar.  It was always visible in the kitchen when we were growing up. I wonder if it was a wedding present to my parents.

Toll House is the only kind of cookie I remember being in it.

This is not a particularly large cookie jar, but then it used to be that a batch of cookies was smaller than we think of today.  A bag of chocolate chips was only 6 ounces.

Cookies - especially chocolate chip ones - seem to be a recurring theme.

I first made cookies by myself when we lived in Ohio in fourth grade.  I particularly remember measuring out six tablespoons of brown sugar.  Since brown sugar holds it shape, I could make it look as if there were half a dozen small brown eggs in the bowl  (hey, I was 9).

The summer after that, back in Delaware, I made a lot of toll house cookies and sold them door to door in the neighborhood.

Fifteen cents for a quarter of a pound.  I think that some relatives must have bought some, too.  There was an option to buy a whole tin full for $3.  I really do not remember what the arrangement was for buying ingredients, but I don't think they just magically appeared.

In any case, at the end of the summer I bought a Brownie flash camera with the proceeds.

And yes, I still have the camera, though I don't know if it still works.  127 film.

I took at least one tin of Toll House cookies to Dr. and Mrs.Webber in the summer after 10th grade, when I audited a pre-calculus class Dr. Webber was teaching at the University of Delaware. It was a course designed to help incoming freshmen, and I aced it with a lot of maternal coaching on the trig parts.  Dr. Webber was just amused to have me in class since he had been Mother's advisor on her Masters Dissertation and thought very highly of her. I'm sure Mother asked him to let me sit in on the course to provide me with something productive to do with my summer.  

There were 18 year old boys in that class, too, but that is another story.

Toll House cookies also were provided to the Tower Hill Summer School faculty lounge in 1963, or whatever year it was that I took a small but arduous course in score reading and conducting from Mr.B.  I was no good at all at transposition, and only adequate at conducting.   The cookies, however, were well received.

At some point - after Deluxe, I think -  I started baking cookies to take to work.
Target(IBM), MSI, and a couple of customer offices all benefited(?) from my signature cookie*, plus experiments with other chip/fruit combinations.

*oatmeal chocolate chip with dried cherries.

Oh how I loved these books!

Childhood of Famous Americans series, bought along with a set of encyclopedia in 1953 or 54.
There were ten about women (blue), and ten about men (red).  They certainly are not heavy on history, but give a reasonable flavor of what it was like to be a child in a particular kind of family in a particular time and place. They are at a pretty elementary reading level.

I know I read Sacajawea, Jane Addams, Martha Washington, Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin many times over.

After I finished the first twenty, I went to the library and borrowed as many others as I could find.
Mother would drop me off at the Wilmington library after dance class, and drive around the block once or twice while I went in and snatched up however many I was allowed to take out at a time.
I suspect that I was reading these long after I could have been taking on more challenging books.  However, by third grade or so, I had heard of a lot of people that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Recently, at a 6th grade exhibit where the kids each had to represent someone famous, I was able to impress (or maybe embarrass) a few people by asking the boy who was being Thomas Edison, "Do I need to talk louder? You are hard of hearing, aren't you?"  I knew that from reading his biography in this series over 50 years ago!

These books have not been interesting to either my children or my grandchildren.  I think they have to be encountered at just the right time or they seem kind of silly.

Afghan of leftovers - 2

In a family tradition.

I made this afghan when we lived in the rental house on Willard Street. The idea was that I did not want to move a big bag of leftover yarn, so I had to make it into something. (Insert incredulous noise from Mother here.)

I have since tried to create similar designs on purpose, but nothing has worked out so well as this Folk Art creation.

Fish sans provenance

This little pitcher was in the basement at Stone's Throw Road. Where it was before that, I have no idea. That basement contained stuff from Grandmom's house, and Alice's, and Swea's, along with Mother's stuff and Keen stuff. There would be Cousin Ruth stuff in there, too. Make up your own story.

I claimed it in 1966 to take to college as unique dorm room decoration, and it has been with me ever since.